I have embarked on a year-long project of regular writing.
I really want this whole process to incorporate some element of accountability. So, today I’m just going to jump in take a stab at quantifying my goals and how I’m doing against them.
Quantifiable goals
For me, it’s super important to qualify and quantify my goals. Some of these goals are related to how I want to feel, what I want my writing to achieve, and how I want writing to be a part of my life. These are arguably the most important goals of all. But I’m not going to talk about those today. Today I’m going to talk about quantifiable goals.
Quantifiable goals are all about the tangible details: how much am I going to write? What am I working on and how far along is it? When do I think it will be done? And, because some day I want to do this for a living, what’s the return going to be on my time investment?
Right now, these goals all about what I’m getting done. Am I putting in the time I want to put in? Is my process working? How much progress am I making on what I’m working on? Questions about ROI will come later.
Am I putting in the time?
Back in May, when I was expecting to be furloughed for two months, my goal was to put in two hours or writing time a day. In practice, that means about 1.5 hours of writing and a half hour of fiddling around, planning, organizing, posting, and thinking.
My plan was built around me being furloughed 20% of my time for two months. Then, In June, we got a big contract and the furlough was cancelled for June—huge win from the “get a paycheck” point of view, but not so great from the “have time write” point of view. Then I took an unscheduled week-long trip to Canada. This has all interfered with my record-keeping.
But, looking back, I’m pretty sure I’ve been able to get my expected writing time in (partially thanks to a four-hour boat ride between Seattle and Victoria). So I’ve actually done well on my writing hours.
Solid A, yay me!
Is the process working?
I have been able to get my writing time in, but it hasn’t always been as part of a regular process.
In order for this thing to succeed, I need a repeatable daily process that won’t fall apart under stress. Even after my July furlough ends, I need to find at least an hour a day to stay on track. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that yet.
So, B grade for now.
Am I getting it done?
Once I got to writing, I quickly found I had to abandon the goal of writing a certain number of words per session. I think this might be a good goal if I was writing fiction. Fiction writing (for me, at least) is a pretty consistent process. Word counts balance out over time. But, I have been writing game content. A successful day of writing background material is very, very different from a successful day or writing up monster stats. I can write background material by the page, but designing monsters and encounters requires focus and thought. And if I’m working on mechanics, a few hand-written notes my represent a full days’ work!
So, word counts won’t work. Instead, I am working on what I’m calling the CoffeeCup scale. One working session is one CoffeeCup. Based on my current project, I think one book is about 12 CoffeeCups. It breaks down something like this:
Brainstorming: 1 CoffeeCup
Outlining: 1 CoffeeCup
Basic writing: 4 CoffeeCups
Layout: 1 CoffeeCup
Editing: 2 CofeeCups
Polishing and cleanup: 1 CoffeeCup
Game design is hard: 2 CoffeeCups
Yes, I budgeted two extra cups just because game design is a weird, difficult activity that’s always more complicated that you expect. I’m a consultant. I always budget 20% for the unexpected.
I started this experiment of writing on May 29. By that measure, I’ve got about 6 weeks of writing time in. So, I should have 20 cups of work completed. For my next post, I’m going to see if my estimates measure up and use that to set my expectations for the future.
Conclusions
This is working, but there are still a lot of ways it can break. I might find that the daily hours aren’t sustainable, or I might start pushing myself too hard. Maybe the books are harder to write than I think and I’m going to need more cups of coffee. Maybe nobody will want to buy the books, and I’ll have to reassess the project. But you know what? I’d rather be finding out if this works than sitting around dreaming about giving it a try.